Pages

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

"Over the Waterfall" -- another D Mixolydian fiddle tune for the Clayville-Prairieland Sessions

At last week's session at Peace Lutheran Church, we took a flying run at "Over the Waterfall." I called the tune because we used to enjoy it when we played it, but we haven't done it in a while and we're getting rusty. Then things got embarrassing in a hurry. Turned out I couldn't get the melody in my head, and we didn't have enough sheet music to go around anyway.

This clip, from the Mount Airy festival in North Carolina, shows a "Musician from Pittsburgh" playing it. I don't know who she is, and the guy who made the video didn't get it. (He didn't give his name, either, so I guess he's known to posterity as YouTube user xanther97.) Whoever she is, she's got the ornamentation and double-stopping (playing two notes at the same time) of traditional appalachian fiddle playing down.

We meet from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Peace Lutheran Church (formerly Atonement, Faith and Luther Memorial), 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield.

Last summer I put up some background information about the tune -- including this not-to-be-missed graphic on the Kitchen Musician website for hammered dulcimer players -- on Hogfiddle. Permalink at:

It's a Mixolydian tune, but both sets of tab, Bellingham's and Three Rivers' alike, are written in the key of D with the C-natural indicated by an accidental. It's that C-natural that gives the tune its Mixolydian flavor -- what musicians call a "flatted seventh" and old-time southern Appalachian call that old D modal key that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up when it's played right. (The "Musician from Pittsburgh" who's linked above plays it right.)

No comments:

Pages

About Me

I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.